This project was conceived and completed in collaboration with Crista Ann Ames (link)

Owing a lot to privilege inventories like the seminal essay Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack by Peggy McIntosh, this exhibit’s engagement with the vocabulary of privileges was a reaction to the brittle and anxious psychological landscape of the post-election. Living in a small city in the midst of a vast red state—one which had overwhelmingly supported a sexual predator for office and the white-supremacist, anti-immigrant, homophobic, and ableist ideologies associated with him—it seemed impossible to avoid the heightened sense of being visible for all those traits that could so easily draw hatred or violence from the people around us. This produced a kind of longing for some form of invisibility, or psychological safe passage, while simultaneously throwing into sharp relief the ways in which we were each already masked within certain privileges or apparent privileges. In this heightened landscape, the ways in which we seemed safe (For Ames, the lack of visual traces from certain experiences that amplified her sense of vulnerability as a woman; for Sherrard, the light skin that masked her African heritage, the gender presentation that masked her queerness, and the education and accent that masked her history as an immigrant) became almost as heavy and frightening as the ways in which we weren’t.

This collaborative exhibit draws from Ames’ background in figurative ceramic sculpture, Sherrard’s background in conceptual art, and both of their experimentations with textile work in order to reimagine this vocabulary of privileges as an ominous crowd of spectral figures or mask-shrouds. Each can be lifted from the wall and donned over the viewer’s faces, temporarily rendering our individual selves invisible and affording us a moment of release from identity hyper-vigilance.  A notebook inscribed with the phrase, “If I were ___ I would” invites us to reflect on and record that moment of ‘freedom’.

Beneath each mask is another level of imagery: a series of figurative hands, diversified by clay bodies and coloration and far more corporal and human than the abstracted identities they support. Each hand forms a gesture that speakers of American Sign Language may recognize: seen together, the hands spell out an echo of that phrase, “If I were I would” and in so doing, affirm the vulnerable and very human quality of such a sentiment.  Perhaps, then, we might empathize with such a longing—even, and especially, our own.

But not without limits.

There are two books, equal in size and color, positioned on either side of the gallery—and while one of them offers us the opportunity to explore the absence of such privileges from our lives and how those absences may leave us vulnerable, or longing, the second book is inscribed with just one privilege; the final thing we may long for when in possession of these others: “freedom from accountability.” That book does not open.

Frightened and weary as we may be, we cannot escape our complicity in creating this crowd of ghosts. We must stand before them, and we must see them.

This piece was installed in the Jodee Harris Gallery at Seton Hill University, PA in 2018, in conjunction with the NCECA ceramics conference.